GreenerPolitics

by Lisa Margonelli, The Atlantic

Forty years ago, the steel mills and factories south of Chicago were known for their sooty smokestacks, plumes of steam, and throngs of workers. Clean-air laws have since gotten rid of the smoke, and labor-productivity initiatives have eliminated most of the workers. What remains is the steam, billowing up into the sky day after day, just as it did a generation ago.

The U.S. economy wastes 55 percent of the energy it consumes, and while American companies have ruthlessly wrung out other forms of inefficiency, that figure hasn’t changed much in recent decades. The amount lost by electric utilities alone could power all of Japan.

A 2005 report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that U.S. industry could profitably recycle enough waste energy—including steam, furnace gases, heat, and pressure—to reduce the country’s fossil-fuel use (and greenhouse-gas emissions) by nearly a fifth. A 2007 study by the Mc­Kinsey Global Institute sounded largely the same note; it concluded that domestic industry could use 19 percent less energy than it does today—and make more money as a result.

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You know, when you run your own podcast, you always hope for the big interview, the one that will make all the hard work you do worthwhile. If I was running a sportscast, it would be an interview with Wayne Gretzky. If this was a podcast covering the doings of the Royal Family, an interview with Prince Harry would not be amiss.

On GreenerPolitics, I scored my dream interview, a chat with Michael Braungart, co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. We talk about waste, the politics of protest, and the need to celebrate human ingenuity.

And speaking of ingenuity, we talk with Nancy Knowlton and David Martin, the co-founders of Smart Technologies, though you might know them better for their invention of the digital-interactive whiteboard.

You know, the one that hooks up to your computer and enables you to communicate verbaly and with pictures in real time.

We talk about how technology fosters creativity and innovation and we talk about what’s coming up for these fast-paced innovators who make their home in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

To download this show, click here!

Michael Tiemann — Open Source

Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, as well as President of the Open Source Initiative. He used to be the Chief Technical Officer of Red Hat. Michael serves on a number of boards, including the Embedded Linux Consortium, the Jabber Technical Advisory Board, the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, and the Board of Directors of ActiveState Tool Corp.
Michael Tiemann featured in Revolution OSHe co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. His programming contributions to free software include authorship of the GNU C++ compiler and work on the GNU C compiler and the GNU debugger. Tiemann is featured in the 2001 documentary Revolution OS.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from the Moore School of Engineering in 1986 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel Brezenhoff for Congress

Daniel Brezenoff is running for the Green Party for Congress while at the same time working full time as a social worker.

Daniel Brezenoff has been active in the civil rights, labor, environmental, and peace movements literally since the age of ten. Raised in a family of civil rights, labor, and anti-war activists, he has organized, marched, spoken out publicly and published essays in newspapers about issues of justice, integrity and nonviolence in government and society. He was the founder of Long Beach Citizens for Peace and a principal organizer for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Daniel has worked on several national and local political campaigns for progressive Democratic, left-Libertarian and Green candidates.

William McDonough, the author of the book, Cradle to Cradle, challenges us to create the sustainable economy.  These two clips from the video ‘The Next Industrial Revolution’ hold the keys to our future: positive, hopeful, creative and challenging.

This first video is a taste of the the thesis of the the longer video, which is 45 minutes long. The thesis of this video is the fundamental thesis of creating a sustainable society: how do we love all the children of all species for all time,

The Tesla Car is Airwolf: beauty, intensity and majesty in one package. When I saw this video, I had a bit of an epiphany: being green is more than birkenstalks and wilderness. It is empowering our engineers, urban planners and business folk to create for us a world that we want to live in.

They so want to do it.

Imagine this kind of creativity put into homes, public transit, government services.